We can understand even better now why the psalms praise God:
O come, let us sing unto the LORD: let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving, and make a joyful noise unto him with psalms. For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods. In his hand are the deep places of the earth: the strength of the hills is his also. The sea is his, and he made it: and his hands formed the dry land. O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the LORD our maker. For he is our God; and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. (Ps. 95:1-7)
The sheep of his hand! Is that a strange expression? Not at all. At least it should not be strange by this time. It is the shepherd’s hand that guides the sheep, the shepherd’s hand that takes the crook to rescue the silly sheep and the rod to guard against the wolf that chases the sheep. And we are God’s sheep for whom he acts in history.
God has made us a promise: He is committed to work in history for us his sheep. Being his sheep is not just pie in the sky, or a better leap than some other leap, or the relief we get from using evangelical God-words. All these are a kind of blasphemy. That we are his sheep means he works in the external world on our behalf.
Jesus uses the image of the shepherd’s hand in exactly the same way: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall anything pluck them out of my hand” (John 10:27-28). Here we see the tremendous fact that the second Person of the Trinity, because he is deity and because of his finished work on Calvary, can say, “When you become my sheep, I will hold you in my hand.” The hand of gentleness and power will hold us securely. In order to bring home this truth with even greater force, he even repeats it, making a couplet out of it: “My Father, which gave them to me, is greater than all; and nothing is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand” (John 10:29).
So we are informed about this titanic security of being held in the hand of the Son and in the hand of the Father. Nothing is able to pluck us out, for our Father is greater than all. Without a doubt, when Jesus said this he was not merely using a figure of speech but was fitting his statement into the whole Jewish mentality of a space-time reality based on the expression “the hand of God.” He who is able and does work in the machine of the universe of the external world loves us and will work in the universe to protect us, to chasten us when we need it for our care. Nothing is able to pluck us out of God’s hand.
Author
Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer was widely recognized as one of the most influential Christian thinkers of the day. He was the author of twenty-two books which have been translated into twenty-five foreign languages, with more than three million copies in print.
Dr. Schaeffer had lectured frequently at leading universities in the U.S. and abroad. With his wife, Edith, the Schaeffers founded L’Abri Fellowship, an international study center and community in Switzerland with branches in England, The Netherlands, Sweden, and the U.S.
This article is taken from his popular book, No Little People, pp. 27-41.
